Make mead, make merry

I’m a do-it-yourself kind a guy. A DIY-er, for those in the know. Recently, the term “maker” is gaining popularity. Given the option between going to the store to buy something and making it myself, I’ll most likely make it.

Sure, I could go out and buy a bookshelf if I need one. But I’d much rather just make one. By making it, I can ensure that it’s the style and color I like, the shelves are the size I need and the shelf will fit where I want to put it. And I also get the satisfaction of looking at the shelf and knowing I made it with my own two hands. In fact, I have two bookshelves in my room that I made myself, and they’re holding up pretty well.

Just the other week, I took my DIY-ness to a new level by making my own wine. But not just any old wine: I’m making mead.

Mead has been around for thousands of years. It’s best known for being the drink of Vikings and the people of the Nordic lands, featuring prominently in their culture and in the epic poem “Beowulf,” in which much of the action of the first part of the story takes place in Hrothgar’s glorious mead hall of Heorot. However, mead has been around much longer than that. Aristotle wrote about drinking it, and archeological evidence shows that people were making mead in 7,000 BCE. That’s over 9,000 years of history for one drink. Not too shabby.

Where “regular” wine is made from fermenting the juice of grapes, mead is made from fermented honey. The process works the same: yeast (a fungus) eats the sugar and turns it into alcohol. Over time, the sugar gets eaten away and you’re left with wine.

Although Neil Gaiman described mead as tasting like “a drunken diabetic’s piss” in his novel “American Gods,” it really tastes more like a very sweet white wine. Mead has complexity and flavor. The smell fills your nostrils and the taste rolls down your tongue smoothly.

My mead consists of three and a half pounds of honey and water balanced to one gallon. The recipe is for an orange-spice mead, so there’s an orange (of course), raisins, a stick of cinnamon and even a clove. I mixed all of that in a one-gallon glass carboy and then added the yeast. I put a special stopper on the top called an air lock (it’s lets gasses from fermentation out of the carboy without letting contaminants from the air in) and let it sit. And that’s it.

It’s a simple recipe, but in about two months, I will hopefully have drinkable mead. Yes, it will take two months. Most of the recipes I found called for letting the mead ferment for six months or longer. I quickly learned it takes much more time to make alcohol than it does to drink it.

But when it’s done, I know I’ll love it. I spent just over $40 on all the ingredients and tools to make my mead, and the one-gallon batch will make about three and a half liters (three and a half bottles of wine), which is a pretty good deal for $40.

I hope others start trying to make their own wines. I found a lot of great information from www.gotmead.com, but there are other homebrew communities out there that people can turn to for resources.

And who knows? You could find out that you love making mead and start your own meadery. And then you’ll be keeping one of the oldest drinks known to man alive and kicking. And boy, does mead have a kick.